Many rugby and cricket fans were horrified by the widespread disruption of the all-white 1969/70 Springbok rugby tour and the sub-sequent stopping of the 1970 cricket tour to Britain. Yet, with 50 years of hindsight, that presaged the end of apartheid sport. Former Cabinet Minister Lord Peter Hain led militant demonstrations against those tours and, with South Africa’s foremost sports historian and fellow anti-apartheid activist André Odendaal, shows how decades of international and domestic sports-political campaigning helped change a country and led to a Springbok team captained by a township kid, Siyabonga Kolisi, winning the 2019 World Cup. A riveting story of sacri- fice, struggle and triumph that reveals how sport can never be divorced from politics or society’s values.
